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Upgrading HD - Time Machine or CCC?

R

rekhyt

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 20, 2008
1,127
78
Part of the old MR guard.
I'm planning on upgrading to a Seagate Momentus XT :))) and I know how to upgrade the hard drive in terms of hardware, but not really on porting back all my stuff to the new hard drive.

I have a Time Machine backup of my whole computer - Would I just boot off the Snow Leopard disk and do a restore from Time Machine, Migration Assistant restore from Time Machine, or would CCC be a better alternative?

Does restoring from Time Machine restore everything?
 
I have an external drive with 2 partitions
1 for TM
1 for CCC

Both have their advantages

With TM, I can go back to a certain state, and even find deleted files, etc.

With CCC, I have a bootable clone that is ready to go should I encounter problems
 
MacDawg said:
I have an external drive with 2 partitions
1 for TM
1 for CCC

Both have their advantages

With TM, I can go back to a certain state, and even find deleted files, etc.

With CCC, I have a bootable clone that is ready to go should I encounter problems
Click to expand...

Ahh... Alright. I don't really need a bootable clone - Will Time Machine do the job well then in restoring my system?

Also, for the Seagate Momentus XT - The 2.5" 7200RPM drive will fit into a MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Late 2008, right? Do I need to do anything special with the hard drive before I install it?

(Format to HFS on another Mac, secure-erase the drive, ...?)
 
Time Machine will do it. Insert your OSX install disk with your external drive connected. You'll come on a screen that gives you a choice to restore your HD from whatever source you want, choose time machine and you'll be set. I did this two weeks ago and everything got restored 100%. Nothing needed to get re-registered or re-authorized. It was all perfect.

I've got a 500 GB MBP, but I only have about 75 GB used on the drive. The reinstall from Time Machine took just about a half hour with this amount of files to be installed.
 
Mac Composer said:
Time Machine will do it. Insert your OSX install disk with your external drive connected. You'll come on a screen that gives you a choice to restore your HD from whatever source you want, choose time machine and you'll be set. I did this two weeks ago and everything got restored 100%. Nothing needed to get re-registered or re-authorized. It was all perfect.

I've got a 500 GB MBP, but I only have about 75 GB used on the drive. The reinstall from Time Machine took just about a half hour with this amount of files to be installed.
Click to expand...
For simplicity I use TM (I do like CCC though). It works really well and restores your data 100% when things go wrong.
 
MacDawg said:
I have an external drive with 2 partitions
1 for TM
1 for CCC

Both have their advantages

With TM, I can go back to a certain state, and even find deleted files, etc.

With CCC, I have a bootable clone that is ready to go should I encounter problems
Click to expand...

This is EXACTLY how I do mine ;)

Best of both worlds and extra backups... I keep my time machine on one HDD and my CCC on a separate (normally one I carry with me)... heaven forbid that disk dies and it has both time machine and CCC on it :(

I've had that happen, so my backups are on separate drives.
 
Don't know what I did wrong, but TM didn't work for me when I installed a new 500 gb hd into my mbp. I'd go CCC in the future. :(
 
rekhyt said:
I'm planning on upgrading to a Seagate Momentus XT :))) and I know how to upgrade the hard drive in terms of hardware, but not really on porting back all my stuff to the new hard drive.

I have a Time Machine backup of my whole computer - Would I just boot off the Snow Leopard disk and do a restore from Time Machine, Migration Assistant restore from Time Machine, or would CCC be a better alternative?

Does restoring from Time Machine restore everything?
Click to expand...

For replacing your bootable system drive, nothing is faster or easier than CCC. Time Machine is more for restoring single files, not really intended as a cloning tool.
 
Time Machine does a great job at restoring an entire HD.
Just boot up from your Mac OSX install disk with your Time Machine drive connected. You'll come to a screen where it gives you a choices to restore your HD from whatever source you want, choose Time Machine, done.

I did this two weeks ago, worked flawlessly. Nothing even needed to be re-authorized or re-registered. Worked perfect. I also have a bootable backup with Superduper, but Time Machine restored my entire HD in about 30 minutes.
 
Ditto on the keeping-the-drives-seperate thing. You lose that drive, you lose ALL of your backups. It doesn't make sense to have two backups on the same drive. They are the same data (although TM has more versions)...only main difference is that one set is bootable.

I think it boils down to how tech savvy are you? If you want a simple backup with ease of restoration, go with TM...it's truly 'set-it and forget it'. I don't use CCC, but it would seem to me that there would be some mechanations to get the Mac to recognize that the CCC drive is the new boot drive, then you would have to go about copying over these files to your new HDD. (If it's easier than this, I apologize...since as I said I don't use CCC) With TM, it's as simple as putting in your OS X disc and following the prompts to restore the system.

Having both, on seperate drives would be the best backup behavior, with maybe the CCC done every week or so on a drive you store off site.
 
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